Istanbul (2 page)

‘Where are your family?’

‘My mother died just before the war. My father is an habitual criminal. He insists on being Jewish at every opportunity, so the police were forced to lock him up.’

‘I see.’

‘What about you,
monsieur
? You are a diplomat,
né
?’

‘Does it show?’

‘If I gave you money, could you get me three visas?’

It was a question he was asked all the time, but not so bluntly and not by a beautiful woman in the middle of the night. He hesitated and she took that for her answer.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You want to get out of Bucharest?’

‘I’m Jewish. Of course I do.’

‘Three visas?’

‘I have a brother. When we get my father out of prison we want to get out of this awful country.’

Visas were more valuable than gold; the British Government had instructed the legation to issue them under only the most extenuating circumstance. They didn’t want all these Jews flooding into Palestine and upsetting the Arabs. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But these days it’s very difficult, the Foreign Office in London . . .’

‘It’s all right, I should not have asked.’ She tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Just here.’

They stopped outside a rundown apartment building; a single gas light burned above a green door, the paint cracked with age. The only other light came from a feeble street lamp further down the alley. It was the kind of place the greenshirts liked to dump a beaten Jew.

‘We used to live on Bratianu,’ she said. ‘Before the government took everything we had.’ Her hand brushed against his. ‘Thank you for your kindness.’

‘Perhaps I will see you again.’

‘I hope so,
monsieur
. . .’

He helped her down from the
trasura
onto the cobblestones.

‘Wait,’ he said. He took a card from his pocket and handed it to her, took out a fountain pen from inside his jacket. ‘Write down the names. I’ll see what I can do about the visas.’

She leaned in and kissed him. A long time since anyone had kissed him like that. And then she pulled away and he watched her disappear through the door. He got back into the
trasura.

And that was all. A chance meeting. An act of gallantry. A brief flirtation. He was married and she was probably too young. He imagined he would never see her again.

CHAPTER 3

It was a week later. He watched his wife pour herself a drink from the decanter and thought about her again. A light breeze came with twilight.

It was the hour of the Korso, when the bourgeoisie of Bucharest took their promenade along the Calea Victoriei. They were drab, the Romanian middle class, the women in Parisian black with such pearls and silver fox furs as they could afford. Only peasants who wore bright colours, so a Romanian proclaimed his status in dreariness.

The leaves on the lime trees had curled to brown in the heat. A fireball sun turned the gold-leaf dome of the Byzantine church across the street to flame as it fell down the sky.

He could almost feel the old Bucharest slipping away; the previous summer you could buy caviar by the pound at Lucchiano’s, French perfumes and silk gloves for your wife direct from Paris in the salons on the Calea Victoriei. Now the shops on the Chaussée were boarded up because of the fascists and there was talk of food shortages in winter.

For a year now the newspapers had scoffed at the Germans and their grandiose military pretensions; the fall of Poland and Norway and the Low Countries had been explained away in the press as blunders by ill-prepared generals.

But the fall of Paris was akin to the barbarians sacking ancient Rome. Didn’t they call Bucharest ‘Paris in a village’? The architecture and boulevards were inspired by France, there was even an Arc de Triomphe for the fallen of the Great War. No-one loved the French like the Romanians, and with the centre of the civilised world under the swastika, all the old certainties were gone.

He closed his eyes and thought again about Daniela Simonici, remembering the smell of her perfume.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Jennifer said. She came out onto the balcony holding a gin and tonic in each hand.

He took his drink from her. ‘I was wondering where we’ll be a year from now.’

‘Still doing penance in this awful country, I expect.’

‘I shouldn’t think so. The Germans are in Paris, for God’s sake. They’ll be jackbooting along the Strand by the end of the year.’

‘Oh, it won’t come to that.’

‘What’s going to stop them?’

She sat down, crossed her legs. ‘I’m worried about the boys.’

‘So am I.’

‘I think perhaps I should go home. I hear Hoare is thinking of evacuating families and all non-essential staff.’

Hoare was head of the legation, and it was true, he was worried. The danger to British nationals was growing daily, some oil executives in Ploesti had recently been arrested and beaten up by Romanian nationalists. Soon even Bucharest might not be safe.

He swallowed half the gin and lapsed into silence. He didn’t like the boys being so far away right now. London was under heavy bombing every night from the Luftwaffe, and a thousand nightmare scenarios had played through his head; of Jamie not making the air raid shelter in time, of Richard asleep in his school dormitory when a stray bomb crashed through the roof. He wanted Jennifer to be there with them, as if the presence of their mother would somehow protect them from German bombs.

He wondered what life would be without her. Would he miss her? He didn’t think he would.

‘What’s wrong, Nick? Or would that be breaking the Official Secrets Act?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I asked you, about a million years ago, what was wrong.’

‘Nothing. Just thinking.’

‘About work?’

‘I don’t always think about work.’

She raised an eyebrow at that.

He studied her in the gathering darkness; still a very attractive woman, slim, straight-backed, her features classically beautiful, as they were when he first met her almost twenty years ago. He wondered, if it ever came to it, what she would do without him; he wondered what he would do without her. Once, he had been too obsessed with his own career to notice that he had a bad marriage; now he was older and his ambitions no longer seemed as important as they once had.

He got up to pour himself another drink.

‘You’re drinking a lot.’

‘Two gin and tonics is not alcoholism.’

Night fell suddenly. The King’s palace was in darkness, except for a blaze of light on the third floor, where Carol was meeting with his council in an emergency session.

The world was closing in on Carol the Cad as his intimates called him. The languorous nights with his mistress on the Avenue Valpache were numbered. Now he was besieged by affairs of state, matters that he had not allowed to trouble him before. Silent crowds gathered outside the gates, keeping vigil, waiting for a divine miracle. Russia was closing in from the north, the Germans flooding in down the Danube, the Hungarians and Bulgarians waiting like vultures for any tidbits. Hard to see what would save them now. Carol was not the man for such a crisis; he was as incompetent and corrupt a man as Nick had ever met.

‘Oh my God,’ Nick heard Jennifer say from the balcony. ‘They’re back.’

He took his drink outside and looked down into the street. A mob of green-shirted young men were marching along the boulevard, shouting slogans. Some of them carried weapons.

‘Iron Guard,’ Nick said.

‘Why don’t the police arrest them?’

‘Some of them
are
policemen.’

‘What’s the King doing then?’

‘He’ll be under the sheets with his girlfriend’s thighs around his ears to block out the noise.’

‘Don’t be vulgar.’

‘There’s nothing can be done about them, Jen. They’re the future.’

‘I’d have them all shot.’

‘He tried that once. That didn’t work either.’ Just before the war thousands of cadres had been executed on Carol’s orders. The joke was that the Guardists were like potatoes, the better part of them was underground. The rank and file had taken exile in Berlin; but now the tide had turned they were swarming back.

The mob made its way up the boulevard towards the lights of the palace.

‘Things may start to get a little uncomfortable soon,’ he said.

‘They won’t harm us.’

‘Why, because we have diplomatic immunity? Because we’re British? Because your father’s distantly related to the Duke of Norfolk?’

‘It’s getting chill out here,’ she said. She got up and went inside.

He sighed. He had grown tired of the secret life, of the secrets he had kept from others, of the secrets he had kept from himself.

CHAPTER 4

When they sent him to Bucharest he thought his career inside the Secret Intelligence Service was blighted. But fortune had been kind to him. The outpost had become the place where the war could be saved. The key to all of Hitler’s plans lay in the Ploesti oilfields.

He had made a point of keeping a distance from Legation staffers. Only the Ambassador, Hoare, the military attaché and Nick’s immediate superior in the Passport Control Office knew his real job.

His office was small, cramped and draughty. There was no heating and just one small window; it was too cold in winter and too hot in summer. There was a clutter of filing cabinets and piles of dusty manila folders on his desk that he never opened. His real work was locked in a grey metal safe in a corner and only Nick and the Ambassador knew the combination.

Until a few weeks ago, he had a Romanian secretary called Nadia, a peasant woman with a bun of thick black hair and a large mole on her left cheek. Her job had been to type correspondence he never sent; he coded his memos to Whitehall himself and handed them to the Ambassador to give to the cipher clerks in the basement.

One day Nadia disappeared and he had not bothered to replace her. People disappeared a lot these days; there was no point asking questions, no one ever had any answers.

The head of station was the Chief Passport Officer, Abrams, an aloof functionary of middle years who seemed too taciturn for the work. The grey wings at his temples appeared so perfect they could have been painted on.

He was one of those rarest of creatures, a Cambridge-educated Jew. Such a collision of ambition and religion had left its mark and he had made himself into a parody of an English gentleman. He drank endless cups of tea, and spoke reverentially of the King in the hushed whispers normally reserved for the deity. He could converse endlessly about cricket and rugby union.

Those who did not know him found chilling. A jagged white scar on his forehead gave him a slightly sinister appearance. Apparently he once fell down some stairs at his public school.

Pushed more like, Nick thought.

He was unmarried and there was a rumour that he was homosexual.

The morning after the demonstration in the palace square, Nick was summoned to his office. Abrams indicated a chair on the other side of the desk and sipped his tea with the gentility of a country vicar while he complained about the heat. Nick fidgeted and waited for him to get down to business.

Finally Abrams set down his teacup with an air of considerable regret. ‘I want you to go to Ploesti tonight,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘Find that chemist chap you’ve been speaking to – Bendix.’

‘It’s on?’

Abrams pushed a file across the desk. It was marked TOP SECRET in red stencil. Nick opened the file; it was the blueprint of a plan to sabotage the oilfields at Ploesti. The Royal Engineers 54th Field Company had been sent to Istanbul from Egypt and were already secretly sequestered outside the city by the Turks, disguised as the Istanbul Number 1 Road Construction Unit. A British merchantman was anchored in the Bosphorus, loaded with explosives and equipment, waiting to ferry them to the oilfields under cover of darkness.

It was a bold, almost reckless, plan. Many lives would be lost. But without that oil, Hitler’s armies would simply run out fuel.

Nick smiled. ‘It’s about time.’

‘Whitehall are waiting for word from us when we have everything ready.’

‘Ready?’

‘The ship that is to carry these men and their equipment will landfall at Constanza. Elements of the Romanian Army are to provide transportation.’

‘That’s very kind of them,’ Nick said.

‘Considerable sums of money are about to change hands.’

An understatement. The pay-offs would have to include Romanian army drivers, border guards, customs officials and not a few generals; but if it worked, it would hamstring Hitler’s invasion plans and save Europe from disaster.